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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27147994">you look so pretty when you bleed</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanica/pseuds/cyanica'>cyanica</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>maybe i just took too much cough medicine [whumptober 2020] [9]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Anal Sex, Blood, Blood As Lube, Blood Kink, Blood Loss, Bloodplay, Bottom Bucky Barnes, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Consensual But Not Safe Or Sane, Consensual Kink, Cutting, Gore, Guilt, Knifeplay, Love Bites, M/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Sexual Content, Smut, Top Steve Rogers, Touch-Starved, Whumptober 2020</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 22:09:07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,539</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27147994</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanica/pseuds/cyanica</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The splatter of blood once the steel knife slit his skin make sinful scarlet splatter across their connected bodies like a clattering paintbrush did against a canvas, and the thought of Steve drawing Bucky back together with knives and pain and retribution where he once had with graphite and greylead was intoxicating – it was everything.</p><p>Or Bucky needs to be purged of his sins,  and they have their own ritual of purification to cleanse him.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>maybe i just took too much cough medicine [whumptober 2020] [9]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947775</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Whumptober 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>you look so pretty when you bleed</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>well… here we are. this was first fic i wrote for whumptober. i saw the promt blood loss and as like,,, but make it k n i f e p l a y a n d b l o o k i n k. not sure if this is that traditional ‘whump’ fic, but here you go anyway???</p><p>whumptober promot day 10: they look so pretty when they bleed, blood loss, trail of blood.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Cleanse me, please.” Bucky moaned, collapsing onto the pristine white bed sheets that smelled of lemon grass and mint once he breathed it all in. Steve, looming before him, pressed Bucky deeper into the mattress, hanging his neck against the other man’s and breathing across his feverish flesh that ached with heat and salty sweat. </p><p> </p><p>“Is that what you want?” Steve drowled in between starving kisses that left marks against Bucky’s neck and jaw. </p><p> </p><p>“God, yes. I need it, please.” He said, while both their hands glided across each other’s writhing bodies, tearing pieces of abandoned clothing from their aching flesh that now lay discarded on the carpet. </p><p> </p><p>At the pure desperation leaking from Bucky’s voice, Steve's kisses became harsher, consumed by lust and greed in a way that seemed fanatic, from starving longing. Sucking the skin between his teeth, Steve bit the delicate, soft flesh of Bucky’s sensitive neck as he arched his back, moaning soft, breathy air against Steve’s ear.</p><p>Bucky felt his’s feet curl up, hands ball into tight, painful fists that drew blood from the nails, similar in the way they had done when they were just two dumb kids who loved what was forbidden, and through Steve was tearing as his neck, making watercolour bruises of purple and blue and black erupt across his pale flesh, the hurt wasn’t enough. They were not who they’d once been, and Bucky was certain not who he once was – not after becoming who he became – and the pain wasn’t enough to cleanse what needed to be purified. </p><p>“Please,” He gasped again, and Steve broke away from sucking bruised love bites into his blackening neck to look down upon Bucky through hazily, lustful eyes intoxicated on the blood rushing throughout his veins and the other man lying entirely as his mercy, begging for penance in a way that only Steve could grant. </p><p> </p><p>“Okay,” Steve whispered, drawing his swollen, glistening lips close towards Bucky’s face, sharing the same oxygen as if to become anymore closer than the universe would ever allow. Without ever taking his mouth off Bucky's, Steve reached for the metallic, sharpened combat knife that reflected the moonlight’s glow as it pooled into the skyrise like illuminating liquid ecstasy, making Bucky’s eyes shine with the image of a thousand stars filling up across New York’s embers of a heavenly night sky.</p><p> </p><p>Yet, as Steve drew the first delicate line of crimson against Bucky’s clavicle, his eyes damned themselves shut. Bucky threw his head back against the pillow, breathing an airy moan that mingled between pleasure and pain and the satisfaction of being purified.</p><p> </p><p>Because that was what it was. It was ritual, a purification, a purging of the sins Bucky was tainted with by exercising himself of the blood that drowned his being in the same way his hands were enterally and infinitely stained in that of others’. It was the purification of the Winter Soldier’s injustices, immorality, inhumanness, and a way for Bucky Barnes to rebuild himself better, and heal in the same way his blood would replenish – cleanse.</p><p> </p><p>The cascade of carvings marked indentations down Bucky’s chest, his highs, his arms and began to stream pools of bright, oxygenated vermilion from his gory flesh. The splatter of blood once the steel slit his skin make sinful scarlet splatter across their connected bodies like a clattering paintbrush did against a canvas, and the thought of Steve drawing Bucky back together with knives and pain and retribution, where he once had with graphite and greylead was intoxicating – it was everything, as much as his ephemeral lucidity was as it succumbed eagerly to the blood loss.</p><p> </p><p>Steve brought his covered fingers to Bucky’s mouth, lacing the blood between his lips, and then kissing him with the taste of iron on his tongue.</p><p> </p><p>“More,” Bucky begged, reaching up and smearing bloodied fingers against Steve’s cheek from the gashes within his arms. The shining rose-coloured wetness was bouncing off the dim room and against the moon’s glow as if it were the only colour in existence, if not for the cyanic hue that shone within their irises as if to contradict the oxymoronic blood that consumed everything. </p><p> </p><p>Steve knew what Bucky was asking. There was something so intoxicatingly intimate in the knowledge that Bucky's entirety of a life hung in the balance of Steve's hands.</p><p> </p><p>They never seemed to need many words after their rituals had become a constant occurrence, and so Steve brought the knife down to the insides of Bucky’s legs, sliding it from his inner high to just below his asshole. The wound wept blood instantly, running down his legs and onto the bed like a twisted, sick masterpiece, and it made Bucky cry out. A low, guttural moan tore itself from his throat, shredding his vocal cords apart, and making a sound erupt into the facade of serene silence like steel wool against glass. </p><p> </p><p>His fingers found themselves to Bucky’s inner thighs, pressing against the wound, and then inside Bucky's dripping asshole as he writhed underneath Steve’s towering form. </p><p> </p><p>He urged more fingers within Bucky’s hole, stretching him out with slick, ruby fingers and blood gushing into him as the indentations weeping blood the way sweet tears were pushing themselves from his eyes. Steve peered down onto him as his fingers pressed against the pulsing walls of the other man’s hole, clenching and then releasing around them. </p><p> </p><p>For someone who looked utterly broken with mutilated flesh that wept lifeforce from lined, jagged wounds across his body, Steve thought he looked beautiful. Bucky lay like someone tortured, cut into smithereens as if he were paper, and the way someone would seem if on their deathbed, though despite that – or because of that – Bucky Barnes looked beautiful. There was something undeniably intimate in the way Bucky’s life hung from Steve’s hands, by Steve’s mercy, and he looked beautiful while dying within this peaceful violence.</p><p> </p><p>He would paint him in this moment later, Steve decided, if only for the fact he had enough acrylic in the colour of red.</p><p> </p><p>Bucky’s fading lucidity was reborn as Steve pushed his cock within his hole, making his eyes go wide and for a transient moment, the nebula of stars that constellated above New York’s sky burned themselves within the ceiling for Bucky to bear witness. He felt his heart pound from every cut within his body, it gushed from every wound and drenched the sheets in a pyretic hot lake of crimson. His cock filled, pumping whatever blood what was left in his body to his shaft, while his head drowned in harmonic dizziness in the wake of reality.</p><p> </p><p>Steve’s thrusts got deeper, harder and had Bucky biting his lip until blood spurted from his mouth, mixing to concoct a gory stream of saliva and sweat down his chin. </p><p> </p><p>“You look so pretty when you bleed,” Steve whispered with a thrust that pushed Bucky completely over the edge. His cock had struck against the wall of Bucky's prostate, hard enough that his vision blurred and whitened when he came, voice shredding as he was overcome by agony. </p><p> </p><p>Steve's face came back into focus like a polaroid lens trying to capture a subject in the darkness of an abyss. It was contoured by smears of crimson and sweet, salty sweat, and made kaleidoscopes of broken mirror shards that amplified with each synchronized beat of their hearts that throbbed against his pyretic, broken flesh. </p><p> </p><p>There was something satisfying in the knowledge that all of this – all the <em>hurt,</em> the blood, all the brokeness – was ephermal, and that he would heal, his skin would mend itself together like torn seems building themselves after the fray, and that all the sin that had tainted his body had melted into rivers of purified retribution and vermilion violent peace coating the once healthy-white bedspread. </p><p> </p><p>Bucky lay like something twistedly forsaken, but purifying clean in the gallows of a sweeter heaven – an oxymoron to the concept of living in all his once-tainted, rectified, almost-angelic glory on the bed of his sins. He basked in the bloodied intoxication, and the amorma of the pungent irony stench of something distinctly human to solidify to himself of who he chose to be, not who he’d become, nor who he had been.</p><p> </p><p>This was recovery in its fucked-up, insane way, but they were okay with that.</p><p> </p><p>Steve loomed before Bucky like a holy shadow that bled virtue as if he were a saint, infecting Bucky’s own impurity with newfound retribution, .who stroked Bucky’s slick hair, ran his red-stained fingers through the knotted tangle with eloquent carefulness as if Bucky was something intangibly godly, and whispered from his glistening, bloodied lips that shone fleshy pink underneath, “you’re clean.” </p><p> </p><p>Bucky’s eyes rolled in his head, the derillum soaking through his flesh down to his bone marrow. His mind floated away with each beat of their colliding hearts amongst the intoxicating afterglow and reborn purification, and with the warmth of blood surrounding his lifeform and Steve existing like an anchor that served as his home, his sanity, his purification, Bucky allowed himself to surrender to the lifelessness of blood loss, and found solidifying serenity, at least for the moment, within this ephemeral infinity.</p><p> </p><p>He was clean.</p><p> </p>
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